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Oppo N1 first impressions and quick review

Oppo has cemented its place in the mobile industry by its Find 5 flagship phone last year. The handset’s impressive design and stunning sc...

Oppo has cemented its place
in the mobile industry by its Find 5 flagship phone last year. The handset’s
impressive design and stunning screen placed the company in international
market. From there, it followed suit with a revolutionary phablet called N1.
The latter was made available in the country last month and we covered a first
impression review.

The Oppo N1 is one of a kind.
Upon its release, it intrigued the world by incorporating a cutting edge 13-megapixel
rotating camera - first of its kind.

Design and construction

The package comes with an
appealing box. Oppo registers a premium looking box that houses the unit and
all necessary out of the box accessories. The device itself is a big – a close
to 6-inch phablet framed with aluminum along the sides. The back panel
registers an HTC One-ish appeal that is easy on the hands and tough on
fingerprints.

Flipping the device, you’ll
see a screen-dominated front panel. It also houses the three capacitive buttons
at the bottom part of the device. At the back, the top portion is the
13-megapixel camera platform. A dual LED flashes also sits on the camera module
itself.

There’s nothing on the top
side while the back gets the company logo and the interesting O Touch pad which
could use to navigate the phone. With the camera module on the top body of the
handset, the device is basically “top-heavy” so it makes holding the N1 in one
hand near to impossible.

The sides of this Oppo are
different from your conventional phones. On the left side you’ll have the SIM
tray that has a dedicated pin for you to push the card out. Power button and
volume controls are found on the right side. Bottom side is the home for the 3.5-mm
headphone jack, speaker grill and the microUSB port.

The Rotating Camera

It is built with a 206-degrees
rotation that perfectly swivels without any shaking or movement that might
interfere with the focus when you are framing your best shot. This is tried and
tested as built for longevity and performance.

The camera boosts 13MP sensor
that captures equally beautiful images on both your front and back facing
shots. There are two flashes on the camera platform – a bright LED when taking
rear-side shots (when camera is faced at the back) and when you turn the camera
at a certain angle or at the front side, it will use a diffuse light to improve
skin tone in selfie shots.

Oppo N1 boasts Pure Image that
is coupled with cutting edge optics that boosts six physical lenses with f/2.0
aperture to give clearer image. Its CMOS sensor is an upgraded 1/3.06 imaging
module. The N1 is a self-made camera phone due to the fact that it could access
the camera app by rotating the camera unit.

Display

The display is stunning at
5.9-inch Full HD. Even though the device is close to tablet size, the display
maintains its quality with 1920 x 1080 pixels resulting in an approximate 373
ppi. Not surprisingly, the display boasts an IPS technology which offers wide
angle viewing. You can also use the phone with gloves on if you toggle that in
settings menu.

User Interface

On paper, the Oppo N1 is
running in an Android 4.2 Jelly Bean environment. However, the device is
heavily skinned by the company’s proprietary interface called the Color OS. The
customization falls very heavy with N1, the main features that has been heavily
tweaked were the lockscreen, homescreen, app drawer and settings menu.

Here’s the complete set of
specifications of the Oppo N1:

OPPO N1 Specifications

170.7
x 82.6 x 9mm (dimensions) at 213 grams

5.9-inch
full HD IPS LCD with 1920×1080 pixels at 377ppi

Qualcomm
Snapdragon 600 1.7GHz quad-core Krait 300 CPU

Adreno
320 GPU

2GB
RAM

16GB,
32GB internal storage

3G/HSDPA

WiFi
802.11 b/g/n

WiFi
Direct, DLNA

Bluetooth
4.0

NFC

13MP
AF rear camera with 206-degree rotation

Dual-LED flash

Color
OS (Android 4.2-based)

Li-Ion
3610mAh battery

Php
26,990

The
Wrap

Oppo
is a premium brand with big guts. The company has delivered in the smartphone
category with Find 5, now it is very keen in gunning in the phablet territory
with N1 – a device with bucket-full of innovation.

The
device has a lot to brag about – superior build quality, stunning full HD
screen, rotating camera, custom Android-based Color OS, and intuitive rear
touchpad. If the lack of LTE connectivity would not be a deal-breaker, the
device would be the one to beat in this division.

However,
it is strategically price lower than its competitors. At Php 26,990, you could
get a full HD phablet with a sparkling character. And in the country like the
Philippines, this may fit into our pockets.